


You Will Only Be Better Loved

by oubliance



Category: A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Genre: Child Death, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 05:15:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/606198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oubliance/pseuds/oubliance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean-Nicolas, mourning, and anachronism.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Will Only Be Better Loved

i.

  
 _The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping,_ _I dreamed I held you in my arms._

You might have called him a traitor of a sort, or called yourself one. ‘He is very happy,’ you said when you came back from Paris. To Madeleine, dying, without your knowledge: ‘She looks after him.’

The woman seems older than your unearthly son, though she is younger.

Shyly you said, ‘Is there anything really wrong?’ – No. Of course not. Lucile smiles. Deputy Robespierre is ageing at a fine lick: after all, he carries the Republic about with him everywhere he goes. Camille can scarcely remember his own handkerchief; perhaps his unburdened state explains his black curls with never a strand of white – or he is still young. 

The baby squalls in a friendly voice. He is like Camille: but rounder, with more colour. A Paris baby flourishing against all expectation in the city air.

You didn’t tell him how good it was in case it made him over-proud. Camille! you think. Over-proud, never. Better to say terrified: the arrogance of a child, the thin hands of a boy, covered in ink.

He reached across the table, took Camille’s hand and said: really.

In the foyer of their comical apartment, Camille sits at the table and watches him eat, and drinks coffee neatly and with apparent calm. Your hands are covered in ink, Jean-Nicolas said. Why don’t you wash them? – You’re sleeping in the bathroom, Camille says.

Reproof is one of the easiest languages for love. He thinks of Camille’s eyes black and blind in the lime; he leaves the table and walks out into the garden. I had the child breeched too soon, because he was clever. I wanted to hurry him on: he was more than capable. 

Arithmetically speaking, he cannot have spent much time writing to Camille, because there have always been other things to do. 

Yet the empty days –

_as for their memories, they were already given over to the calumny of their triumphant enemies._

  
ii.  


Camille was an unsatisfactory infant: Doctor Rouffard thought he’d slip through their fingers. It just goes to show: Henriette smiled sooner, fed better, had nine years under her belt when she died.

‘If you want to leave,’ he said. ‘Leave.’ If Camille could make a name – and then he thought, Camille has never had occasion to make a fire, let alone something more lasting. Louis-le-Grand, his son’s letters complained vividly, was not warm.

The bad, Jean-Nicolas thought, live to a great age, no matter what their follies.

_You will only be better loved, if you fear you are not._

‘Is there anything really wrong, Lucile? He doesn’t eat.’ – No. He’s writing, you see. Camille’s like that. Oh, look, Horace’s smile! He knows Camille’s name, not only ‘papa’. We want to be free. Her gaze is brilliant as she speaks: we want to be free.

  
iii.  


Fancifully, Jean-Nicolas wonders about their ages. Will Henriette recognise her mother? And Camille, who did not die at home, unshriven by choice or necessity: more scared than Jean-Nicolas can stand imagining. 

The frost-hard dust of the Cour des Messageries glittered round about; he watched his son’s black eyes fill with tears. Regardless of the public and the Republic, Camille wept at the parting. For twenty years, since a serious, reproving, soon-regretted letter sent to Louis-le-Grand, Camille has somehow (or other) managed a dry-eyed farewell: Jean-Nicolas never questioned him about the time after the diligence door closed. That was Camille’s other life; he might baptise it as he wished. What he wrought himself to as a infant Picard – O, my child, Jean-Nicolas hardly thinks: the words are present without thought – he cannot, now. My regrets are importunate.

_O God, if it be true that thou hast existence, save the men who are worthy of Thee. We want to be free. O God, the cost of it!_

Sage men know the value of grief: it’s taken me so long to learn. – Jean-Nicolas, apportion it justly. 

You have other children. The Republic drinks them up. To even fear such a thing is to insult human reason.

I might have learned other languages! no longer: but in his reproofs, he is perfected. What after all did Camille say first? Something incongruous, followed so fast by other words that the shock was in the mind, not the event. The brain is written out in ink and it will blur. Jean-Nicolas –

He cannot remember.

  


iv.

You will only be better loved, Robespierre wrote. If you fear you are not.

Now and then, you received ill-written letters. You were too kind a father to dub them ill-written on account of simple tears: he had but seven years, and could not do up his buttons, when you lifted him into the Cateau coach. 

There was a phase of profanity which was no more acceptable for being witty, when he was fifteen, sixteen. And now and then – or, that’s the rub, not _now_ , only then – he asked for money with such self-obsessed desperation that you threw the letter into the grate. O, letters of Camille! You say it aloud and hear Marie’s step halt in the passage. Is his reason gone?

Little black-eyed regicide, sitting at his own table at long, long last: a baby (probably his) disposed upon the floor. ‘You look ill,’ Jean-Nicolas said. – Yes, I am dying. Camille says this, and smiles, and then compunction strikes him. I was joking.

Lucile writes in her diary that they want to be free.

  
v.  


One morning you wake at four and the birds are clattering outside in the trees, and a thin voice, high, sweet, broken, shouts in unintelligible Greek: you know it is Greek, and indeed you know Greek, but you cannot understand him. Camille? It’s always been difficult to tell whether he is frightened or thrilled. Or it’s not him, but the birds.

_Can it be that when on one side servitude and venality hold the pen, and on the other freedom and virtue, that there is the least danger that the people, the judge of this combat, can pass to the side of slavery? To even fear such a thing is to insult human reason!_

Lifting his son up to see out of the window, the living body in between his hands, the child’s skirts rustling against him, and the sunlight outside holding the world still.

_We want to be free._

  
vi.

One morning you woke at four and the birds were clattering outside in the trees, and a thin voice, high, sweet, broken, shouted in unintelligible Greek.

One night you cannot face your empty bedroom, so you walk into Camille’s empty bedroom. He is sitting on the window-seat. The shutters are closed. He wears a white nightgown and his hair is tangled. He looks at you calmly. You say, Camille. Camille. 

Your voice is nearly soundless but you’re certain Camille hears you. You look hard at his neck, it’s impossible not to, and he smiles with a comical, aching sweetness and tilts his head back, showing unbroken, damage-free white skin. It is a sensuous, strange, loving gesture, Camille to the bone – as it were.

_When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken, so I hung my head, and I cried._

He lifted his son up to see out of the window, the little body was between his hands, the child’s skirts rustled against him quietly. 

Sunlight outside held the world still.

  


**Author's Note:**

> Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins appears to have visited his son in Paris towards the end of 1793. His wife died shortly before Camille did; two of Camille's brothers were at that point believed to have died in combat, although it later emerged that one had in fact been taken prisoner. 
> 
> The existence of a Desmoulins 'bathroom' is not an anachronism as such; their apartment had a room dedicated primarily to bathing and washing, though it doubled as a guest room.
> 
> [](http://www.tracemyip.org/)  
> 


End file.
